Sundays are for writing your first ever Sunday Papers. Though your excitement, like mine, may slip a little when you realise you’ve been reading almost anything but gaming articles this week. So, I shall be leaning quite heavily into the “(mostly)” in the column’s mission of rounding up “great writing about (mostly) videogames”.
I hope you’ll be able to find as much joy in writing about bacteria, lighthouses, and life after a nuclear war as I have.
I do have one gaming piece to recommend. Writing for 404 Media, Jules Roscoe reports on the immigrant rights organisers using Fortnite to train people on how to resist ICE agents. Videogames have often been used as virtual meeting spaces to host discussions on topics other than games, but in this case, the activists are using the functions of Fortnite to make their lessons interactive.
At the bottom of the courthouse stairs, two government agents step out of a purple golf cart. They approach the door. They’re carrying guns.
“Hey, is anyone inside?” one of them says. “Any vulnerables in here? We have a warrant. We have a warrant for any vulnerables in the area.”
One civilian opens the door, sees the agents, and immediately slams it shut. After more warrant calls, the civilian says, “Slip it under the door.”
“I would slip it under the door, but there’s no space under the door,” the agent says, stuttering.
The civilian pauses. “Well. Sounds like a personal problem.”
Over on the London Review of Books’ blog, Liam Shaw writes about soil bacteria and its continuing efforts to baffle scientists. Despite decades of research into streptomycetes and the antibiotics the bacteria produces now being widely used to treat patients, the people studying them still don’t know how the ground-dwelling organism actually makes them.
Then and now, our ignorance of what happens inside cells is often far more profound than is conveyed by the neat diagrams displayed in textbooks. One of the authors of the recent paper owns shares in a company that promises ‘chemistry from nature’. It’s a painful way to learn. Disentangling the biochemical cat’s cradles that power life can be nightmarish. But there are plenty of reasons to persist. As [John] Sheehan said, ‘nature designed the penicillin molecule to teach organic chemists a little humility.’
I’ve also enjoyed John Hendrix’s review of Manu Larcenet’s graphic novel adaptation of The Road. It’s a weaving piece that tries to tackle his own connection to stories of the apocalypse, McCarthy’s legacy – changed since the allegations published in Vanity Fair, that he had a relationship with an underage girl –, but ultimately it focuses on adaptation. What is gained and lost from a story that moves from prose to panel.
Larcenet’s gorgeous drawings themselves create a wonderful new tension. How can something so awful be so strikingly beautiful? What McCarthy did in stark, elegiac prose, Larcenet does with kinetic, scratchy images. Quietly walking through the evil ashes is somehow a place you wish to linger. Each page is a formal symphony of designed black shapes, gestural lines, white highlights, and satisfying spatters of texture and tone. Ironically, the endless downed power lines, wrecked vehicles, and lovingly rendered shelves of rotting consumer products reveal a strange truth: The story of The Road is about the impermanence of beauty. Over millennia, humanity has fashioned a lavish cultural tapestry—one that could be erased with the push of a button.
(Though, I’ve not found many examples online of the art Hendrix describes. So, a copy of the book will likely end up in my basket shortly.)
While not about games, it was off the back of playing Double Fine’s Keeper – the game in which you play a sentient articulated lighthouse on a mission to save the world from a parasite called the Whither – that I dug out an old journal article on the history of a Florida lighthouse.
It can be difficult to look at lighthouses beyond their symbolism as beacons for hope or, alternatively, signs of great isolation. In part, it’s because they’re no longer a significant part of our daily lives. Shipping technology has advanced, making sea travel safer, and what lighthouses remain are largely automated. But, in reading histories, like James Taylor’s article in the Florida Historical Quarterly, which shares the story of one lighthouse in Anclote Key, you can see how these buildings functioned as homes and parts of the local community. Here, for instance, the daughter of a lighthouse keeper remembers her time living on its island.
For keepers the lighthouse was their job, but for children it was a huge toy, as revealed by Betsy Meyer’s memory that “the tower, with its 105 steps stood sentinel over us all, even though I thought it was special playground equipment for me to walk and balance from one post to another.” She ran up and down the stairs, only taking rests at the windows. Her father affectionately named her “Merry Legs” for all of her running. When not playing in the lighthouse, Betsy and her brother Gus traveled the beach, entertaining themselves with the numerous fiddler crabs that scurried away from their feet. At dusk, Mary would walk to the end of the dock and watch the “glorious sunset that made one know God was in his heavens and I, in my own small way, in mine.”
Music for this week? In all honesty, as we move into December, I’m going to be listening to Taylor Swift’s Evermore album and ‘Tis The Damn Season in particular. It evokes Joni Mitchell’s River, which has been a Christmas constant for me over the years. But as the sun hides earlier and earlier in the day, December is also the time to listen to Lankum, their music tickles a part of my soul that hides deep under the earth.
